Related papers: Ribosome self-assembly leads to overlapping reprod…
To double the cellular population of ribosomes, a fraction of the active ribosomes is allocated to synthesize ribosomal proteins. Subsequently, these ribosomal proteins enter the ribosome self-assembly process, synthesizing new ribosomes…
Replication time is among the most important components of a bacterial cell's reproductive fitness. Paradoxically, larger cells replicate in less time than smaller cells despite the fact that building a larger cell requires increased…
Despite growth being fundamental to all aspects of cell biology, we do not yet know its organizing principles in eukaryotic cells. Classic models derived from the bacteria E. coli posit that protein-synthesis rates are set by mass-action…
Ribosome is a molecular machine that polymerizes a protein where the sequence of the amino acid residues, the monomers of the protein, is dictated by the sequence of codons (triplets of nucleotides) on a messenger RNA (mRNA) that serves as…
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
We study two mechanisms for the formation of protein patterns near membranes of living cells by mathematical modelling. Self-assembly of protein domains by electrostatic lipid-protein interactions is contrasted with self-organization due to…
In the self-assembly process which drives the formation of cellular membranes, micelles, and capsids, a collection of separated subunits spontaneously binds together to form functional and more ordered structures. In this work, we study the…
Bacteria are able to maintain a narrow distribution of cell sizes by regulating the timing of cell divisions. In rich nutrient conditions, cells divide much faster than their chromosomes replicate. This implies that cells maintain multiple…
We present an analytically solvable model for self-assembly of a molecular complex on a filament. The process is driven by a seed molecule that undergoes facilitated diffusion, which is a search strategy that combines diffusion in…
Recently discovered simple quantitative relations, known as bacterial growth laws, hint on the existence of simple underlying principles at the heart of bacterial growth. In this work, we provide a unifying picture on how these known…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
Bacteria tightly regulate and coordinate the various events in their cell cycles to duplicate themselves accurately and to control their cell sizes. Growth of Escherichia coli, in particular, follows a relation known as Schaechter 's growth…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
The formation of a viral capsid -- the highly-ordered protein shell that surrounds the genome of a virus -- is the canonical example of self-assembly. The capsids of many positive-sense RNA viruses spontaneously assemble from in vitro…
The rate at which individual bacterial cells grow depends on the concentrations of cellular components such as ribosomes and proteins. These concentrations continuously fluctuate over time and are inherited from mother to daughter cells,…
For many viruses assembly and budding occur simultaneously during virion formation. Understanding the mechanisms underlying this process could promote biomedical efforts to block viral propagation and enable use of capsids in nanomaterials…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…